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sciencehabit sends this excerpt from ScienceInsider:
"One of the big three research agencies appears to be lagging behind its doubling peers in the president's 2013 budget request released this morning. The $4.9 billion budget of the Department of Energy's Office of Science would rise by 2.4%, to $5 billion. In contrast, the National Science Foundation would receive a nearly 5% boost, to $7.37 billion, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology a hike of 13%, to $860 million. These three agencies were originally singled by President George W. Bush in 2006 for a 10-year budget doubling, a promise that President Barack Obama and Congress have repeatedly endorsed despite the current tough economic times. ... Obama is
asking for a 1% increase in overall federal spending on research, to $140 billion. Within that total, the White House seeks a similar 1% hike in the $30 billion devoted to basic research."

They don't want to admit it is realty about attacking Obama while controlling women. Does that mean Obama has no agenda? Of course not, but giving women the free choice to engage in sex without shame and with medical attention, well that is just and right.

What? I mean..really....what???

No one is controlling women. They are just as free as men to fuck at will....with our without shame.

But why the fuck should someone pay for them to do so? If they want birth control, they are just as free now to get it as

What would you rather do: pay a few dollars for someone to get a set of birth control pills, or a few thousand dollars to house kids in orphanages, pay for parents with kids that they're not prepared for, or, heck, just deal with the social outcomes of children being born unwanted?

It's not a fucking right, but it has a fucking awesome ROI compared to the alternative.

Only a few thousand? Man you must live in a third world country, it's about $35,000/child/year to house a kid in an orphanage.
But hey, let's not even think about that the overall savings, when gp can get pregnant or has a medical condition that requires the hormones in bc, you tell me again. I mean, why the hell should we pay for cancer treatment when you don't have cancer?

The ROI goes straight into big pharma. Paying for condoms and pills for a single couple over 40 years is probably $20,000

I think you may be overestimating that a little bit. A 24 pack of condoms every week only adds up to around $20k between a woman's puberty and menopause. That's a pace that very few (if any) couples can match. Birth control pills are more than 40 years old now. If ever there was a cheap pill, it would be that one. If it were allowed to be OTC, it would be even cheaper (as Zyrtec an

It's insurance. The women pay for it, along with the rest of their healthcare through insurance.

Contraception is more critical to women's health and wellbeing than to men's because men walk away from pregnancies without health problems, an STDs are more infectious to women. Denying contraception is a way to keep women down.

Accidents happen even to the most careful people. Either society pays a few bucks now, or tens of thousands for the next 18 years, plus however long their more-likely jail sentences are. It's financial and medical insanity to deny these things. Just ask the doctors, who know a lot more about the societal impact of these things than you clearly do.

No one is controlling women. They are just as free as men to fuck at will....with our without shame.

But why the fuck should someone pay for them to do so? If they want birth control, they are just as free now to get it as before....why should other Joe/Jane Q. citizens have to pay to subsidize them fucking? Something that I think everyone will agree upon...is a decision that is up to the individual to make.

Since when is birth control a fucking right??

Since women have to carry the baby. Why do people weirdly assume that sex is an equal-sided equation? Men insert into women and once the event is over if certain measures aren't taken women become pregnant a majority of the time. Thus preventing women from getting birth-control limits the amount of sex that can be had for women due to the risk of pregnancy versus men who can keep going willy-nilly until court cases catch up to them with paternity.

As for the actual issue at hand in this current setup is that religious organizations (such as private religious schools and hospitals) along with employers in general want to be able to morally justify their prohibiting of birth control on their insurances. The public isn't paying for birth control in this scenario and your line of logic could justify life saving treatment, public schooling, and to be on topic: research grants. But the reality is as a society we agree to do certain things for each other no matter what we personally think because we agree to live in this society.

" But the reality is as a society we agree to do certain things for each other no matter what we personally think because we agree to live in this society."

As far as I can tell, republicans have no interest in living in a society with democrats and doing certain "for" each other. They would rather live in an alternative reality. The entire GOP agenda now seems to be one giant experiment in sociopathy. Everyone for themselves, privatize everything, and end all government and regulations no matter what the

Not all Catholics are Republicans, just as not all Republicans are [Socially or Fiscally] Conservative.

Ignoring the argument about being for or against contraception, which I think can be a valid argument in both angles simply based on your belief system, I do have trouble with the government mandating that one side simply accept it. My particular trouble comes from the exemption that some religious groups have from the health care bill (many other Christian groups). If one recognized religious group gets a pass, then why doesn't another for similarly recognized notions?

Besides that, I imagine that the Catholic fight has a lot less to do with contraception in the form of birth control (even though Catholics are strongly opposed to that alone) than it has to do with drawing a line in the sand. I believe that the fear is a lot more than Big Government forcing them to cover Birth Control. It probably stems from the fact that the logical next step is one that crosses a much larger moral quandary: abortion. And it's really not much of a leap to assume that that is the next step given the nature of the current step.

I happen to be a fiscal conservative, and I am not a Catholic, nor do I particularly like the Republican party (even if I do tend to side with it in politics, but only because they tend to be more conservative).

Republicans are against evolution and climate change science; Democrats are for them. They are two of the most fundamental sciences bearing on public policy. Before that Republicans were against "tobacco kills science" while Democrats were for it. The list goes on.

What I find the most crazy is that being "against" evolution just doesn't compute, it's a non-sequitur. It's like being against conservation of energy (I mean here a law of Nature). You may not like that our biosphere works this way, but that's just too fucking bad I say. Pretending that biosphere works some other way doesn't make it so...

What plenty of people somehow don't get is that scientific theories (even in mathematics!) are based on observed facts, and they have predictive power. Being against evolution is basically saying that one is against what we observe and the fact that we can predict things based on it. It's absurd at best.

That's the real problem I see in plenty of uneducated BS: there is the use of words, but those words don't mean anything. It's like asking for the meaning of life: the phrase "meaning of life" doesn't mean much. There's an infinite number of things that we can write that are completely meaningless when posed as general questions. It's like saying "meaning of number five", or "meaning of bees". You can ask about meaning of certain things in context where they appear, like what is the meaning of number five in some poem, or meaning of bees on some painting. But that's not, unfortunately, how plenty of highfalutin' existential questions are posed...

That's a great example. Bush put a lot of money into AIDS prevention and research, which is a great thing. But the groups he funded were prohibited from advocating for contraceptive use, ignoring all the research that tells us family planning is crucial to women's health. Look at all the good Bush did with that money, and think of how much better that would be if it was spent the way science tells us is effective?

Like I said, they only care for science when it fits their social agenda.

Why should we be sending all that money to another country to begin with???

How does that help or strengthen the US's position?

Do we not have US citizens still getting AIDs here ? Why are we not eradicating the problem here and getting our own house in check...before throwing our hard earned money to foreigners all over the world?

Because Bush's AIDS spending was a subsidy to American drug corps it was required to be spent on.

This is true of most foreign aid. Either direct subsidy to American vendors through a foreign customer, or freeing up foreign funds from the American funds' target so foreign funds can be spent on American vendors. And amidst the $billions, some is spent on even less direct strategic subsidies to American vendors.

The benefits of these programmes, while including foreign consumers, typically accrue mainly to the rich Americans who make the foreign deals, and the large shareholders and their financial support class.

Because no country, like no man, is an island. Our economies depend on those countries, albeit usually indirectly, but in very real ways. Raw materials, labour, shipping, produce, you name it. Plus there's the benefit of helping 30+ million people not die in agony and leave their similarly-afflicted children to a life of abject hell. Surely you can accept that if the world was a better place to live in for everybody, it would be a better place to live in. I've never seen a terrorist movement born from well-fed, safe, healthy people, but plenty of allies.

That's because AIDS work is the only positive accomplishment that Bush can point to. You can give him that one.

However, cynics looking into his AIDS accomplishments also point rightfully to the fact that his initiatives REQUIRED that AIDS drugs be bought through American sources. This wasn't exactly fleecing these foreign countries (as the prices were actually fair when compared to the prices of the same drugs in the states), but it was another windfall for his corporate buddies. It also prevented these countries from saying to hell with drug patents and setting up their own drug manufacturing (which would have produced the drugs at costs even more reasonable for their poor population).

Well, for starters, he only asked to increase the budget for science in his last year in office. In previous years he had been cutting it. Also his party opposed him on the increases. Then there's the fact that he routinely cut funding for agencies that violated the Republican dogma, such as the EPA. Oh, and the fact that one of the key aspects of the Republican Party platform is the lie that all the scientists in the world are part of one big conspiracy to trick people into thinking the world is getting hotter. Not to mention the Republican Party's constant support for creationism. And their turning the world "intellectual" into a pejorative.

The Republicans are very much anti-intellectual. You can pretend otherwise if that helps you sleep at night, but you are fooling yourself.

Considering that Obama has only been president for slightly more than three years (and president-elect for only 4 months more), I find it hard to believe that Mitch McConnell has been stating that objective for 4-6 years. Besides, if you look beyond that statement to the reasoning behind it, you might find that there's some logical rationale behind it.

How do you sleep at night when we've seen this exact policy from the GOP for the last 4-6 years.

Clearly stated by Senate Minority Leader McConnell (KY):

"Our number one priority is to make Obama a one term President."

It really doesn't get much clearer than that.

Actually, it does get clearer than that:

“Well that is true, [making Obama a one-term President is] my single most important political goal along with every active Republican in the country. But that’s in 2012. Our biggest goal for this year is to get this country straightened out, and you can’t get this country straightened out if we don’t do something about spending, about deficit, about debt and get this economy moving again. So, our goal is to have a robust vibrant economy that wi

Of course he is all for cutting spending as long as it doesn't affect his corporate contributors. There isn't one Republican saying we need to cut the fat in the defense department even when they make all other federal spending look like change for the coke machine.

A doubling over ten years does not mean double it now and keep it that way for a decade. It means "sometime in the future, when I'm not in office anymore, the next guy should double it". The fact is that compared to funding levels in 2000, their funding levels only received inflation adjustments through to the 2007 budget. Only in 2008 did they get a noticeable increase. This information is readily available on the organizations websites, such as here [nsf.gov].

Now please, try to refute the parts about the Republicans supporting creationism or using "intellectual" as an insult. This should be a fun read.

John C. Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum, said he was surprised to see that teaching both evolution and creationism was favored not only by conservative Christians, but also by majorities of secular respondents, liberal Democrats and those who accept the theory of natural selection. Mr. Green called it a reflection of "American pragmatism."

That help? You're right. It was a fun read!

Also note that, as a conservative myself, I do not favor the teaching of Creationism in school, as part of the official curriculum. However, I don't feel that schools should have the right to say that creationism is wrong.

It may be well-written, but it's full of hyperbole, and even outright deception claiming that the platform claims "all scientists in the world are part of one big conspiracy". Well-written flamebait got the response it deserved.

Unfortunately, as with all government spending, there is a lot of pork and corruption, but there are also some legitimately big technology products that advance the state of the art under the guise of military spending.

More energy research? But how will that impact our fossil-fuel overlords?!

On a serious note, my only real hope is that either patents won't be granted, or else they'll be granted and licensed at essentially no charge to American companies for the advances, and that companies would have to compete based on their efficiency and ability.

Personally, I'm wondering why we should be increasing research spending at all. Unfortunately, our political environment has become such that a spending freeze is often mischaracterized as "you're cutting off funding for X" when in fact such a proposal is status quo.

How do you grant an X prize for basic science research? Basic science is the area where the government is absolutely needed because no company can afford to fund it as there is no payback in the horizon that a companies shareholders will find acceptable (excepting those with a government granted monopoly like Bell Labs). Most practical research should be left to the private sector because as you say the government is not particularly effective at picking the right horse.

Come on, man, how can you be against research funding? It doesn't matter how much debt it generates - it's an investment. We can patent the resulting technology then hand it over to the Chinese to build it for us. Be sure to send your grandchildren to law school so they can become IP lawyers and sue the Chinese companies for infringement, that way they might make enough money to pay off all the debt.

Why do you think anyone is against research funding? It is possible to be against "government-determined" research funding, there are alternatives.

A common argument against a private alternative is that there is no profit motive. But if taxes were lower people may donate to a private non-profit that serves the same function as government in funding basic research. We could argue about how likely people would be to voluntarily donate, and whether a private organization would be more or less efficient than th

Well, the US spends about $150 billion on science research per year. That works out to about $1,000 per income tax payer per year. If you didn't have to pay taxes, how much would you voluntarily donate each year to a private "basic research" organization?

And a 1% increase is actually a decrease. You have to talk in inflation-adjusted numbers for it to mean anything. That said, just maintaining the status quo is somewhat generous; we do need to back off govt. spending as the economy improves.

As pointed out, a 1% increase is not keeping pace with inflation, and is therefore a decrease in real dollars. The baked-in numbers for a typical grant allow approximately 3% year-to-year inflation, so 1% more money means every funded grant will see a reduction of 2% in buying power, on average (how would you feel about taking a 2% pay cut next year?). Also, since government agencies have already encumbered budgets for the most part (that is, most of their budget goes toward funding existing grants) a dec

When talking about investing in research, I don't know. I'd hate to get cancer in 20 years and there be no cure because we cut research spending, rather than social security, defense spending, or medicare. I mean, I realize that's a tough one politically, but maybe talk about it at least?

Since he knew his fellow conservatives would want to cut the research budgets, he offered up a less-than-inflationary offer for an increase. He'll likely cave on either no increase whatsoever, or a small cut.

Thanks a lot, President Lawnchair. Maybe some time in my lifetime we'll get an actual liberal in the white house (though I can't think of when that would be)?

Thanks a lot, President Lawnchair. Maybe some time in my lifetime we'll get an actual liberal in the white house (though I can't think of when that would be)?

I too would like to get a real liberal in the White House. Till that date comes, all I can do is to try my best keep the wacko Republicans from getting the Presidency, pack the courts, and hand over what little remains to the Mulitnational Corporations and the banksters. That means voting Obama.

Unfortunately I agree with you. Obama's been a disappointment at best and a damned disaster for civil liberties, but our system is Broken and so we're left with the binary choice of Bad or Worse. Worse is letting the Republicans run things again, after they've shown they can't be trusted with a free hand,/and/ most of their leadership from the Bush II years are still in place, so they're not even/sorry/.

You are erroneously assuming that liberals would only spend what isn't there. A liberal could cut the military budget and have enough to bring research spending up to where it should be and reform health care without increasing the national debt.

Instead we get one [wikipedia.org] conservative [wikipedia.org] after [wikipedia.org] another [wikipedia.org] conservative [wikipedia.org] after [wikipedia.org] another [wikipedia.org] conservative [wikipedia.org]. We don't seem capable of breaking this chain. We've had nothing but conservative presidents for around half a century now and no matter what happens we'll get another 4 ye

The National Institutes of Health would also see its budget remain flat, at $30.7 billion

Thanks a lot. And for those of you who think you don't care, it's worth pointing out that NIH is the first funding agency to require publications coming from its work to be put in open-access or publicly-accessible journals. The other agencies are still allowing their work to go into paywalled journals at the time. So even if you don't agree with their mission of health research, you might want to at least take notice that they are trying to ensure that the work the taxpayer pays for is in a place where the taxpayer doesn't have to pay again to see the results.

NIH is the first funding agency to require publications coming from its work to be put in open-access or publicly-accessible journals.

I'm pretty sure this is not true - NIH-funded researches still publish in Nature or Elsevier journals all the time, without paying extra to make their work open-access. (I know this because I get c**kblocked by the paywall every time I'm browsing the literature on a weekend.) The requirement is actually that they deposit the manuscript in PubMed Central within either 6 mont

NIH-funded researches still publish in Nature or Elsevier journals all the time

Which is still allowed. I can't force you to read the requirements if you chose not to.

The requirement is actually that they deposit the manuscript in PubMed Central within either 6 months or a year (I forget which) after publication, regardless of what other arrangement may have been made with the journal.

So you did read the requirement, then. Where is your grievance?

So everything funded by the NIH should, in theory, become open-access eventually

I have a hard time believing it's as good as your link says. Thinking about the funding opportunities I applied for in the last three years I'd say the funding success rate in my experience is much closer to 8% than 18%. I can think of two grants I wrote (one NIH, one USDA) where the success rate ended up less than 5%. If we went back to the 30% success rate of 2003 I'd be dancing buck-naked on top of the lab benches...so I guess there's an upside to the abysmal funding since nobody wants to see that.

Not only are not all NIH-funded studies published openly (would be nice though) but they're also evil, traitorous bastards. They spent tens of millions of taxpayer dollars trying to prove something they knew wasn't true, that eating fat made you fat and that eating cholesterol raised your cholesterol count. The closest they could get was proving that taking a drug to lower your count decreased your risk of heart disease. Then they told us that fat was bad for you and we should all eat a lot of carbohydrates

In other news China's technological espionage department has just petitioned Beijing to allow them another 1% more funding to help steal the extra technology discovered from America's 1% tech research spending increase.

A 5% increase, devoted mostly to energy research would make sense. Diverting all money from the Mars/Moon budget would certainly help. Near Earth orbit is research. Until we have a money-positive, energy positive use for the moon or Mars, they're hubris and nothing more.

I don't care who's president; I fully endorse this. If anything, they're not putting nearly enough money into these programs. This sort of thing is where our tax dollars should be doing. This and infrastructure. But I don't mean the kind of crap infrastructure programs like we've been seeing these past few years that do nothing but keep a few construction workers employed and puts money into the hands of companies that would have gotten business anyway.

What I mean are public works projects like those seen in Japan, South Korea and China; programs that have a long term positive impact but that actually make sense for the region. Of course, that pointless high speed rail that's been bandied about is not one of them. Unless we were developing our own high speed train and not just buying something overseas. We don't even have the expertise in this country to build our own high speed rail.

Absolutely money should be shifted away from defense spending, but I'd also like to see less spent on wasteful, shortsighted social programs. There are people out there who need the help, but many of these programs don't provide any long-term benefit for the country and merely increase dependency. Change the cultural mindset in this country and teach these people to fend for themselves and you'll see a much more profound improvement.

Of course, a lot of jobs have moved overseas and there's no bringing them back. The real challenge is to strike a good balance, something like Japan or Germany has managed. But I think the mindset in those cultures is quite different to what we have here in the US, at all levels. Unlike the average American workers, the lowliest employees still have a strong work ethic and take pride in what they do. And at the other extreme, upper management still has a lot of pride and maybe even nationalistic tendencies. And they still have a drive to actually make something. American management, however, seems intent on finding with quickest and easiest way to make a buck at the expense of everything else. But then, sometimes you can't blame them. I've got friends who complain that you spend several times more getting someone in the States to make something, but you don't even have a guarantee of quality.

Look at something as simple of toys. The nicest, highest quality stuff routinely comes out of Japan and Germany and often it's still made domestically. Compare that to American toys which are always made in China, usually poorly conceived and where the cost-cutting is always evident. With the vast majority of "American" products it's only a matter of time before China builds brand strong enough that they can stand on their own. At that point why bother with the middleman? The middleman being the American corporation that does nothing but own a brands, logos on the box, basically.

And that's where the fundamental problem arises. Will we be able to maximize the benefit of this investment in science if we end up offloading all of the actual design and manufacture to a foreign company? Are we just going to end up making a bunch of guys at the top even more wealthy? But then, I guess we have to start somewhere.

But cutting a far smaller research budget will? Where's the logic in that?

And who says that a balanced budget is the right thing to do? Economists will tell you that a balance budget when you are trying to grow the economy is a bad idea. People just think blanketly that you always have to balance your budget but it just doesn't work that way on the scale and scope of a government our size.

Now that's not to say that things aren't out of whack. You just need to prioritize things.

But cutting a far smaller research budget will? Where's the logic in that?

The budget can't be balanced until people learn to give up things. That means everyone. If you want to say "my pet program is exempt", then so will everyone else. Then no one gives up anything, and the problems just get worse.

And who says that a balanced budget is the right thing to do? Economists will tell you that a balance budget when you are trying to grow the economy is a bad idea.

When do we not want to grow the economy? Apparently, the answer is "in the future, when the bill for the spending comes due". Ask Greece how well borrowing and spending works to permanently sustain economic growth.

Why do you keep calling it my pet program? Do I look like a politician to you? And what makes you think that science and research is a pet program? You wouldn't be debating on this website with me if it wasn't for government spending on science and research.

Yes you usually want to grow the economy but you definitely don't want to shrink it now.

A pet program implies that it only benefits the person interested in it and a small constituency. Like a senator from idaho might have a project that gives tax credits for purple potatoes. That would be a pet project of his. Advancing society through science and research is everybody's project.

We should have balanced the budget during the last boom. Instead we went to war and cut taxes for the wealthiest people. Now we are in the shit and can't afford to. Best we can do is hold out until things get b

Its gonna take sacrifice and likely major overhaul of the social programs for the US too....medicare/medicade and SS are the largest money pits of the US Feds....at some point, and soon, we have to do something about those!!

Hell, if they just for a START, would let the Feds negotiate for drugs for medicare/medicade like the VA system does...a lot of $$ could be saved in on quick step!!!

I have a hard time believing that basic research is a pet program. Science research puts America ahead economically. It's an investment. I feel like pet programs generally benefit the few, and aren't of great concern, and generally lose money. Major infrastructure, like bridges around New York City, aren't pet programs because they must be taken care of for the good of the economy as a whole. Major bridges that are built when small bridges would work - those are pet projects. Basic science research in

Sure they can, just allowing the Bush era tax cuts to expire gets rid of basically all of the growth in the deficit (as a percentage of GDP, which is what matters) for the next twenty years or so. Science research is a self funding line item in that it increases GDP pretty much as fast as you fund it (within reason, mythical man month applies to science just as well as programming).

Cutting defence spending would actually make things worse, not better. The government, no matter the programme, is a giant mechanism to pay its own citizens money from other citizens. If you cut defence spending by 500 billion dollars that 500 billion dollars worth of people who now collect unemployment, income supplements etc. And there's no other jobs eagerly awaiting those people unfortunately, oh and all of the stuff they were working on no longer exists to try and sell to other people.

Current politics has pushed out all rational discussion of good debt vs. bad debt. Nationally and individually we would all suffer with lower quality of life if not for good debt.

Good debt produces a return on that debt greater than the interest paid on that debt. Who here paid cash for their house, or for their education? Both are considered good debt (generally speaking) since wise purchasing using that debt results in accrued equity (the house) or increased income (education). Assuming you don't buy

Research is food for the economy. We won't be able to balance the budget if there's no revenue, and there won't be revenue without businesses providing jobs, and there won't be jobs without innovative new technologies and products.

Your proposal for the economy is like balancing a household's budget by eliminating all spending on food. Sure, if you can do that over 10 years you'll go a long way towards balancing your budget, but more than likely by that point your household's members are either all dead or spending all their time subsistence begging while living under a bridge (with a household budget of $0).

And if research is food, education is water. Sorry this is a food analogy instead of a car analogy.

Ah the old "you have to spend money to make money" business adage. Too bad big business is the only beneficiary of government R&D spending; everyone else pays twice over... first as a taxpayer and then as a consumer.

A more financially responsible move would be to "INVEST" in R&D (with selection possibly based on a tender process), so at least the taxpayer can get some dividends.

That's like saying college tuition doesn't pay for your salary after you graduate.

That whole internet economy? Government funded research built it (insert stale Al Gore joke if you must).

Interstate highway system, infrastructure 'investment' without which this country simply wouldn't be a shadow of itself today. And you know how they built it? Using research paid for by the government.

There isn't enough money to balance the budget through cuts. The only way to balance the budget is through growth. And research investment is a tried and proven way to increase growth.

Never happen. Anything less than the expected increase (always above inflation, of course) counts as a "cut" by the politician's opponents, and of course you can't "cut" welfare or defense, which means you have to increase the spending on those programs well beyond inflation. Since those are the biggest spenders in the budget, the result is an ever-growing budget with absolutely no chance of being balanced anytime soon.

You are absolutely right, what is needed is someone to say "everything gets a cut (a gen

My guess is ARPA continues to use the money on stuff like better batteries, but I agree, this should be $0 until the budget is balanced - in fact, I would take it one step further - is at a surplus to pay back debt and start funding social security and medicare for the future. I personally wish they'd do research on the types of Gen IV reactors that burn nuclear waste instead and turn a storage problem into an energy solution. That said, there are a lot worse things for the federal government to waste money

This is why the US is doomed. $15 trillion in debt and and $117 trillion in unfunded liabilities, and the/. crowd is so opposed to cutting any spending that just mentioning the idea gets you unfairly moderated into oblivion.

This is what I'd like to see... Spend on whatever gives us more bang for the buck... Somehow, I don't think war is giving it to us, it's spending a lot of money with little return, when there's a million other things the same money can be spent on that'll help people and help boost the economy. All that we're spending on war is just like burning bucks for bangs, with very little return back into the system.